News Roundup: Jeep’s hybrid Grand Cherokee, a street drug made from exhaust filters, and more 

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Welcome to our round-up of the biggest breaking stories on Driving.ca from this past week. Get caught up and ready to get on with the weekend, because it’s hard keeping pace in a digital traffic jam.

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News Roundup: Jeep’s hybrid Grand Cherokee, a street drug made from exhaust filters, and more  Back to video

2022 Jeep Grand Cherokee lineup includes PHEV and PHEV Trailhawk

Jeep debuted its first plug-in hybrid with the introduction of the new 2022 Grand Cherokee . Riding on a new platform with fresh styling inside and out, the fifth-generation comes with a plug-in option for a number of trim levels: Limited, Trailhawk, Overland, Summit, and Summit Reserve. The 4xe is expected to get 40 km of EV driving on a single charge; its combined range is more than 708 km with an efficiency rating of 4.1 Le/100 km. The 2022 Grand Cherokee is expected to hit Canadian markets later in 2021, followed by the 4xe early next year. 

The United Nations is looking into this U.K. motorcycle crash

A motorcycle accident that claimed the life of a 19-year-old British man has become a topic of international political interest. The American woman who was behind the wheel of the car claimed diplomatic immunity before fleeing the country, then was discovered to be an inactive CIA agent. As convoluted as it is tragic, the matter has drawn the attention of two American presidents, U.K. Prime Minister Borris Johnson, and now the UN via the U.K.’s foreign secretary. The criminal case against Anne Sacoolas for the death of Harry Dunn by dangerous driving is ongoing. 

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People are crushing up catalytic converter filters to get high

“Are we engines or are we humans?” That’s the surprising question recently posed by Congo’s director of the World Federation against Drugs, Dandy Yela Y’Olemba, after the rise of a trend involving the consumption of crushed up automotive parts for the purposes of intoxication in his country. Dubbed “bombe” meaning powerful, the brown powder is a blend of sleeping pills, sedatives, and crushed catalytic converter cores that, when smoked or snorted, can cause users to enter a subdued, nearly catatonic state. The drug’s popularity has allegedly triggered a rash of auto part thefts in the African nation. 

Daytime catalytic converter thieves caught on camera

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Catalytic converters are going missing in North America, too, frequently at the hands of thieves. A woman in Surrey, B.C., recently interrupted a pair of saw-wielding thieves with an audible “excuse me,” sending them peeling off in a plate-less getaway Ford. The unidentified woman’s short video shows the startled thief quickly righting himself and running for the car as another hops in the driver’s seat. “It was less than 30 seconds it took them to get it,” the woman told Global News. “I think they know they’re in and out so quickly that it doesn’t matter… His body language coming towards me was terrifying… I was way closer than I meant to be, so it was a complete panic.”

Survey says Canada is the fifth easiest country to get a driver’s licence

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A new survey conducted by Zutobi, U.K.-based online driver’s education course, suggests that Canada is one of the easiest nations to obtain a driver’s licence . The company looked at the way countries assess aspiring drivers, including age, difficulty of the tests, and cost, ultimately naming Mexico, where some motorists aren’t even required to drive during a test, as the easiest place to acquire a licence. Qatar, Latvia, the U.S., and Canada rounded out the top five. On the other end of the spectrum are countries like Croatia, Hungary, and Bahrain, where permit programs require drivers to practice for dozens of hours and fork over as much as $1,600 for lessons. This news, though interesting, is not likely to be well received by the thousands of Ontario novices trapped in the hellish backlog that currently plagues the provincial testing system .